Sometimes after writing some code in the terminal, I find it very hard to find my mouse pointer quickly because it is very invisible in the dark background. So I decide to find a good way to solve this problem.
To make the cursor easier to see, you can enable Increase Contrast, change its size and add a colorful border. To make the circle larger or smaller, open Settings - Accessibility - Pointer. Clicking on any of the color wells opens a color picker that lets you change the setting for the selected color. ITerm2 has a custom color picker. If you don't like it you can revert to the system color picker by clicking the rectangular icon to the right of the eyedropper. Smart cursor color.
Actually there is not very good post about the mouse pointer in Mac, that is why I write this blog post.
1. Change system mouse cursor size
OSX does not have options for changing the color of the mouse pointer, but you can change the size of if in System Preferences > Accessibility > Display to make the mouse pointer bigger.
2. Add something around the cursor
You can use some 3-party software such as Mouse locator to creates a green crosshair of sorts around the cursor making it easy to identify. I did not test this way but you can try as you like.
3. Change system mouse cursor image
I like github. I found an open source software called Mousecape in github here, which allows the customization of cursors for Mac OS X 10.8-10.10, you can use it to change the cursor of your mac quickly. If you do not want to create the icon by yourself, just use the default cape file in the source. It works great!
5. Why it still looks so bad in some application
Change Cursor Size Mac
After changing the mouse pointer by using Mousecape, I found the cursor looks still bad in iTerm2 app, then I realized that some app such as iTerm2 might use the image of its local file instead of global. Actually I got that somebody have the same problem since the mouse cursor is not invisible in darkground xcode.
Many people like set the iTerm2 background to dark, so if we change the image file used by iTerm2 to show the mouse cursor, then our problem can be fixed. Here we go
- Download this cursor image to your mac
- Enter the directory
/Applications/iTerm.app/Contents/Resources - Rename the IBarCursor.tiff to IBarCursor.tiff.bak, IBarCursorXMR.tiff to IBarCursorXMR.tiff.bak
- Put the downloaded image to this directory and rename it to IBarCursor.png and IBarCursorXMR.png
- Now close iTerm2 and restart it, you can see the mouse in the app is more visible than before.